Google’s Street View cameras may have broken the law by gathering personal information while photographing houses and people as they trawled the streets of Australia, an inquiry found today.

Australia’s privacy commissioner, Karen Curtis, is believed to be the first investigator to claim that the internet giant breached privacy laws when it collected personal data from computers as its cars passed by houses.

The company has agreed it will not extract personal data again and will assess any information picked up by the Street View cameras.

Authorities around the world have been investigating Google after it was revealed it had ‘extracted’ some 600 gigabytes of personal data from unsecured wireless networks.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has in the past accused Google of doing it deliberately and labelled it the ‘single greatest breach in the history of privacy’.